One of the best ways to get people to know about your online store is through marketing. But did you know that your plan will fail if you do it wrong? Read on to learn how to avoid these big mistakes.
Online marketing is a field that is always changing, and experts and people in power are always looking for new ways to reach their goals. These goals can include building brand awareness, getting more people to visit a website, increasing sales and profits, and getting, keeping, or satisfying customers. We could keep going. Shopify store owners or the experts they hire need to be very creative to keep up with how their customers change and adapt their strategies to the way the market works.
When marketing doesn’t work
We’ve seen hundreds of Shopify stores use ads and other marketing tricks to try to increase their daily sales. But there are a few situations in which digital marketing can hurt your business instead of helping it. In this article, we’ll talk more about these business failures that lead to a business downturn. Try to avoid them or fix them if you’ve already noticed them in your own plan.
Wrong or missing marketing strategy
Just because you open your store doesn’t mean that people will rush in right away. You’ll need to come up with a plan to help them at every step of the buying process. Not having a marketing plan is one of the worst things you can do, because it’s like giving up on a brand-new store and then blaming it for not selling anything. Your marketing plan should include all parts of the buying cycle. Make a plan of action that starts with getting customers, such as with SEO, Adwords, or Facebook ads. Second, think about how you will keep them in the store: pop-ups, push notifications, coupons, etc. Then use pop-ups to get them to finish the checkout. What if they leave the cart without paying: cart abandonment, e-mail marketing. How will you get them to come back? With a newsletter, automatic emails, and remarketing. But the list could go on for a long time, since these are only the most basic ways to market your store. There are, of course, a lot of other options, such as influencer marketing, content marketing, giveaways, cross-marketing, and so on.
If your store doesn’t have a good plan, that’s a big mistake. But having a bad plan isn’t any better. If you don’t send notifications or emails at the right time, if you send them to the wrong people, or if you split your budget between different solutions in an unfair way, you do a lot of damage to your business and your budget. It’s wrong to focus on useless strategies, since your store might not even need that solution, or to try to make a trending method work just because everyone else is doing it. If you spend money on marketing but can’t get anything out of it, it’s time to make a change. You need to realize that you or your marketing expert are going in the wrong direction. Remember that you can always change. Keeping a bad idea alive is worse than the extra work it would take to change it.
Do you know what the best way is to figure out the best way to market something? Get away from the store and look at each process from a different angle.
Not having a blog
Your online store should have important parts like content and email marketing. If you only put products, categories, and a list of your best-selling items on your website, Google bots will rank your store low in the search results. This is because you don’t make useful and relevant content that would help Google bots find you and, of course, your customers. Blogging helps with SEO and many other things, like keeping customers happy and keeping them coming back. You can even combine content marketing with e-mail marketing by asking your customers or store visitors for their e-mail addresses. Then you can send them all of the new things you make. But this method also has a lot of rules of thumb. First of all, don’t change. Don’t wait a long time between articles or newsletters. Post on a regular schedule. Don’t write about something that has nothing to do with your field. Read our other article if you want to learn more blogging tips and find out why store owners should have a blog.
We need to put an end to a myth right here. Marketing doesn’t have to cost money all the time. Many Shopify store owners think that if they spend a lot of money on ads, their store’s statistics will improve. If done right, this can be true. But if you can get more views without ads, why would you pay for them? The most important thing is to improve your strategy, which includes both your content and SEO. There are now a lot of free courses, articles, and ebooks that can help you learn these parts. If you put your keywords in the right places on your site and write relevant articles, your store will be ranked higher for sure. This will bring you more customers and visitors.
You Should Know That It Doesn’t Just Happen.
To avoid confusion, we don’t mean to say that this tip can replace the whole marketing process, but it can save you a nice amount of money. Still, you will need to use other marketing strategies during other parts of the business cycle. Also, keep in mind that it takes time to see results from SEO or any other marketing solution. Don’t think that your sales will go through the roof overnight. Especially with SEO, it takes longer for the results to become clear. Because of this, Google bots have to crawl your site to see the changes, which can take a while. You can speed up the process, though, by adding more backlinks to your store and putting out more and more new content regularly. So, Google won’t want to miss the chance to scan a site that is always being updated.
Giving Away Too Much
Giveaways have a lot of problems. One mistake that store owners can make is giving them too much. First of all, this method is only used when people are desperate. Their sales and number of visitors are low, and their current marketing isn’t working, so why shouldn’t they boost those numbers with some free gifts that people will love? The main goal of this old idea is to quickly increase the number of people without spending much money. But if you use this method, it will only bring in people looking for free stuff and hidden treasures. These people probably won’t be interested in your store at all. They only come for the free stuff, which throws off your numbers. Even though the number of visitors will go up, you won’t make more sales.
Second, if you use this trick often, people may think your store is a scam and your service is low-quality. People these days get a lot of offers like this. Even if they don’t know anything about the company, they will stand in line for free stuff. Because of this, you’ll end up with a bunch of useless email addresses or signups that won’t help you make more money. This strategy might work once a year, but using it over and over again will hurt you more than help you.
Miscalculated E-mail Marketing
It’s always a good idea to get your visitors’ email addresses. You can get them to sign up for your sales and marketing funnels, like newsletters or automated emails for remarketing. This is the perfect solution because it is easy to scale up and doesn’t limit your creativity. Telling your past customers about new products, collections, or brands coming to your store can get people who haven’t been coming back to your store to come back. But email marketing has its own rules as well. The most important thing is to be consistent, just like when making content. Don’t send out your newsletters at odd, random times. Also, show respect for the people you want to reach. Don’t send emails on the weekends or late at night. You can now use e-mail marketing software that lets you send messages to your visitors when they are online the most in their time zone. You need to watch how your audience acts to figure out the best time to send them something. You can try out different ways of writing, different times, and different subject lines. This method is called “A/B testing,” and it can be done by most automated messaging software.
Dividing Up Your Audience Is Key
Aside from consistency, time, and the subject line, store owners ignore one very important thing. This is called segmenting the audience. You make a big mistake if you send your newsletters to all of the email addresses you got without thinking about where you got them. As they move through your cycle, different kinds of customers need different kinds of input. Some of them came to your shop only once. Some of them had already bought things, while others left their carts empty. Sending the same information in the same way is not a good idea because they are not interested in the same story. Sort your customers into groups based on where they are in the buying process, and try to write a newsletter for each group. Instead of sending all of your prospects the same email, focus on information they might find important and that moves them to the next level of your marketing plan.
Using The Wrong Tools for Marketing
It goes without saying that marketing won’t work without the right tools. Shopify owners can look through the App Store to find apps that meet their needs. But it’s not as easy as you might think to find the best application. First, you need to be clear about what you want. If you don’t give yourself goals, you won’t know how to reach them. You can choose from a wide range of options today, such as apps that work with pop-ups, push notifications, Facebook messages, emails, and so on. Before you choose your perfect match, you should do a thorough checkup. There are big differences in how much things cost and what they can do. You will also have to spend time setting things up and, if necessary, integrating them.
Because they don’t know what its features are, many store owners don’t even use the full power of the apps they use. This is why it’s important to do an analysis before and during use. Don’t forget that you need to keep an eye on their performance and make changes as needed. As people’s actions and your target market change, your results can go up and down in a big way. Your app for marketing needs to be adaptable, scalable, and, most importantly, agile. You also don’t need to sign up for dozens of them; just a few should be enough. We need to stress again how important your plan is. Only if you have clear goals and ideas for each step of the business cycle will you be able to find the application you need and know how to set it up. Keep in mind that if you set up your marketing app wrong, it will hurt your business, confuse your customers, and waste your money.
Not Knowing The Behavior of Your Target Audience
A big problem is that you don’t know what and how your target audience does on your website. Why? Because you won’t know what they want or how to give it to them. If you don’t know why people buy from your store or why they leave, you won’t be able to market it as well as the competition and will fall behind. When people visit your site but don’t buy anything, it could mean that you’re using the wrong marketing strategy or that your target market isn’t clear enough. If your ads are for the wrong people or send the wrong message, people will leave your site right away. Even if they click on the ad, they will close the tab after a few seconds because they won’t find what you’ve promised in your campaigns. If you don’t make any sales, your store will close, so try to ignore this serious mistake.
Even so, you can avoid this problem area in your business by paying more attention, just like you can fix any other problem. You need to figure out who you’re talking to. Use Google Analytics on your site and check the stats in Shopify all the time. They will tell you where your visitors come from, where they go from there, how long they stay, etc. If you keep an eye on these trends on your website, you can figure out what your customers really want. They might be looking for something that isn’t on your site yet, like shipping information or the “About Us” page. If you know more about your market, you can improve your marketing, your online store, and your sales.
Buyers’ needs not met
So, you won’t be able to meet their needs if you don’t know why they visit your site, what they are looking for before they get there, and why they leave. If your marketing message is unclear or gets people’s attention, but the landing page is about something else, they will close the tab without ever looking at your inventory. This is why being consistent should always be the most important thing. Keep your campaigns and messages in line with what you can do for them. If you want to be successful, you should always put the happiness of your customers first. But if you confuse them with different signs, they will never come back to your store again.
Wasting Money on Ads That aren’t Working
This is the second most common marketing mistake today, after not having a plan. Thousands of Shopify merchants use Adwords, Facebook, Adroll, and other marketing apps to boost their sales. When we talk about digital marketing, these solutions are the ones that people most often choose. Because of this, if you don’t know much about online marketing, you can make a lot of mistakes that will hurt your business. First of all, if your store is only half done, doesn’t have SEO, proper and complete product pages, or is missing some important pages, you should fix those problems before starting a campaign. If you start an ad instead of working on making your store better, you won’t get the results you want. People often think that ads will solve all of their problems on the site. They also think that their app will make them rich quickly after a few days. But this is the wrong way to think. If you want to know more about why Shopify stores fail, you can read another article we wrote about it.
There are a few things that people do wrong when they make ads. First of all, just like with email marketing, it’s important to divide your audience into different groups. You shouldn’t let these tools target people all over the world. Instead, you should limit the number of countries where your videos or pictures can be posted. These countries shouldn’t just be any old ones; they should be the ones where your target market lives. You can also play around with other settings, such as automatic ad placement, start and end dates, and bid strategies. When making an ad, these are the little things you need to pay attention to. You can still make them better after you’ve started. Also, it’s important to keep an eye on their performance and make changes to get them more involved.
Accuracy is Very Important
Key words are just as important as the setting of the target market. It’s important to set your keywords well because it helps people find your site. If you use the wrong keywords, people will leave your site quickly because it doesn’t have what they were looking for. Try to use both phrase match and exact match. You can also use negative keywords. This means that Google won’t show your site when certain words are searched. This way, you can make sure that only people who really need what you have to offer will come to your site.
Also, it’s important that when they click on the ad, they see the information they need. Make sure that your customers land on a page that matches the message of your ads. This is important because in Adwords, your ads will compete with others’ for placement, and if your ads aren’t very accurate, searchers are less likely to see them. For example, if you advertise a certain brand in your ads, send people who are interested to a site that only has products from that brand. This is true not only for Adwords but also for Facebook.
Keep track of your marketing budget and how well each solution is working. If you need to, change the way money is given out. Be creative, and don’t be afraid of a little bit of change.